I have mixed feelings about the relaunch. I don’t know that it’s added a huge amount to the overall experience. I certainly miss the skill wheels which I found more comprehensive than the new system – even if it contained many more “redundant” powers.

The game is significantly easier it seems, though not sure if my knowledge from playing TSW impacts that but overall that’s not a bad thing, and the community seems a little less welcoming and helpful than before. Perhaps the two are connected. As it devolves into a solo experience (or at least a limited team experience) perhaps the urge to cooperate with friends and colleagues is less urgent?

Agartha’s revamp… I kind of get the whole hub thing but I don’t know why they needed to remove the branches and put the jumps in. Similarly the combat reticle… I don’t think that’s actually fixed any significant issues.

All in all my gut instinct tells me that what’s been removed is missing but what’s been added hasn’t resolved a huge amount so I’m still kind of meh about it. I can’t reconcile the notion that almost universally the fan base and those who’ve encountered the game said “The story’s the thing” and yet we only get part of the story right now. The cash spent on the relaunch could have been spent tweaking the game and adding a lot more content, thus making the old game more viable.

Perhaps. If this relaunch works, then good, but if not, we’ll know soon enough.

I find it interesting that SWL isn’t really drawing in new players, but instead mostly drawing back in older ones (if the poll is anything to go by). I mean, wasn’t one of the big reasons for the relaunch to bring in new players?

I played it in the past, and it updated last night, but I didn’t see my character listed (I did the transfer thing), but I may need to get into Agartha before that is available. I got pulled into another game, so I only made it so far through the tutorial, which seems to have been improved a bit. Voice work is still top of the line, facial animations are still cringe-worthy. lol

Your TSW character isn’t transferred over, only the cosmetics/sprints you had on your account. You’re correct in that you have to reach Agartha for the first time before you can pick them up for your SWL character.

I dabbled in it last month when it launched, but it didn’t really stick. Already dropped it again. The story is “ok” but I am not head over heels for it like some people are. Everything else is to clunky and not enough to prop up the game. Combat is boring, items are borng and the cash shop penetration into all the sub-systems is pretty real.

Playing it and (mostly) loving it. I owned TSW but never really touched it. It did not – and SWL still does not – make a particularly good first impression. But I’m glad that I finally gave it the time to allow it to demonstrate its qualities.

The only reason I am going to steam is for the steam wallet payment options. While I didn’t have any problem with HiPay for my first month I saw enough issues reported to make me a bit wary of it so that I didn’t feel secure with it.

Steam is just an extra comfort layer in that regard for me personally :-)

Gah ….. I got hit with the whole you must use the steam client because I purchased The Secret World on steam even though I have been quite happily playing on the Secret World Legends standalone client for the past month.

Yes I was going to use the steam client eventually but I was hoping to wait till the dust settled before I jumped over but now if I want to play I have to use it and accept that I may have to deal with the issues.

Funcom being Funcom again and never making things easy for their players /sigh

EDIT: Oh yeah if you use mods of any sort on the SWL standalone and then download the steam client it overwrites them. So make sure you make a backup of your mods before you click the install button /double sigh

I was so worried about this, so worried. I don’t have that steam account anymore, long story, it’s in safe hands, was for a good cause.

At that time i made a new account a few years back, another thing is i “NEVER” under any circumstance buy an mmo through steam, ever.

However not really ever thinking TSW was for me, who knows i may have hit a steam sale simply to check it out, thank goodness i didn’t buy it through steam WOW, what an epic F’up that would have been.

I’m quite content to continue to use the Funcom Client. WHEW!!!!!!!! and happy i don’t need to use steam, hey nothing against steam it’s i never liked mmo via steam. To be forced though, blows, should be an option.

Thinking about it I am a bit wrong with what I typed above If I remember correctly I took a break from TSW and when I returned I was a few issues behind. So to catch up I purchased the massive edition dlc bundle thing they had on steam and applied that to my Funcom account. I think it is that which has flagged my account as a “Steam” one rather than a Funcom one.

Oh well no big deal I guess, it is just Funcom being Funcom and making things overly complicated for their customers.

I played before, I went back for the relaunch, but I wont be playing anymore as the combat still sucks balls. Pity as the game is awesome in so many other ways but the one activity you spend the most amount of time sucking badly is just too much of an issue for me to contend with.

I got back into the game during the relaunch, so far the game has been polished up and the team has been very open with the community, taking criticisms as they come their way. Still there have been a few glaring issues that dampen my enthusiasm for the game which go so bad that I had to put the game down waited for the steam re-release.

That issue being there’s way too many quest items that get stuck in your inventory that you’re unable to delete, with bag space being much more costly now it can be annoying. When 1/3rd of my bag was taken up with items I could not get rid of, I had to put the game down in frustration and hoped that complaints like mine would be addressed in the steam release update. I haven’t seen any word on it yet, so I’m holding off on reinstalling the game.

FYI, one way to get rid of items like that is the construction benches. I used the one during the time travel mission in Egypt where you have to create some particular McGuffin on a table. If you place the quest items on the table and then close the window, and log-out/log-in, you’ll find they’re destroyed.
A miserable hack, but it works

Played TSW before, quit, came back with the relaunch and switching to the Steam version today. The relatively small game world is still a bit of a drag, but overall I’m enjoying it. Dungeons are more rewarding, particularly now that there are rewards for running them on something other than max difficulty. Scenarios are more fun as well, I’m still not nuts about them but they beat the hell out of the terrible old scenarios.

The best part though is the more diverse metagame; granted, it’s early and things could change but TSW’s late game suffered horribly from the insanely unbalanced state of the elemental force passive. It’s nice to be able to play sets that look and feel good to me and be reasonably confident that I’m not performing grossly, hilariously behind everyone else I team with. The balance isn’t perfect (as if game balance ever is), but it’s difficult to overstate just how badly elemental force distorted the TSW metagame. Good riddance to it.

Missing option for me – I have played Secret World before and may well try out Legends some time on Steam but it won’t be today or imminently. I can’t say there’s anything I’ve read that makes me think it will be any better than it was before, but quite a few things sound off-putting. I have plenty of better games to play at the moment.

Came back last month, still playing a bit to complete the quests with friends.

However, after reaching the elite dungeons?
Nope, I won’t continue.
Utterly pointless grinder, like pretty much all those other themeparks.
The story dungeons are pretty cool, if linear. I liked them. Then I did them in elite and… it’s the exact same thing. Grind, grind grind and you reach elite 2, which is identical, with tweaked numbers. Grind grind grind and you reach elite 3… until elite 5 there’s literally no difference from the levelling dungeons.

Just why?
Because of that garbage fake progression with +1 to your gear that gives you the privilege to kill +1 mobs?
I was afraid of that with the relaunch, and that happened as predicted.
Endgame progression is complete shit.

After the ten-day closed beta marathon, learning the new mechanics, worrying about my character’s face, worrying about the legacy transfer, briefly worrying today about my account getting messed up from the Steam launch, and tinkering with mods until I got all the functionality I had in TSW, the dust has finally settled and I can just, you know, relax and play the game. Or maybe I’ll take a nap.

I gave it a shot for a few days but ended up dropping it. The combat is just too clunky for me. I also couldn’t motivate myself to get past Kingsmouth. I was doing alright along the main story line until I got a message saying that I couldn’t progress on the main line anymore until I go back and do side missions to level up more before the game would let me move on. Eh. I just don’t have the patience to deal with that anymore.

I gave up playing a couple of years ago just after the flappy event . I am back and enjoying it again but I will be glad when I am past Egypt because I will be into content that is totally new to me from that point on .

The main problem with the Steam launch seems to be that anyone who had Patron status before currently loses its benefits when logging in via Steam (and accounts are linked automatically, so if you played TSW on Steam you can no longer play SWL through the non-Steam launcher without permanently unlinking the account) – https://twitter.com/SecretWorldLgds/status/892112160351936513

They’re hoping to fix this in a patch tomorrow when Whispering Tide launches, but any missions done between now and then will probably still have a 3 day cooldown.

Yeah over 4k reviews and the game was launched a couple of hours ago. It might be ok with fans of the game but i hoped better from steam. You guys can act like there isn’t something shady about it if you want. A positive rating on a game before its launched on the steam platform is wrong.

The only difference in the steam client and to what I have been playing for the past month or so with the standalone are they payment options. Everything else about the game is functionally exactly the same. So putting up a review based on the standalone client is perfectly valid imo

They kept the same steamid, which means it has the same store page, reviews, forums, etc. as TSW. This is common (possibly even enforced by steam now) when games change names / relaunch so devs can’t erase a game’s history by changing the name.

I came back for the re-launch last month and totally addicted at the moment.

The combat feels a lot more fluid now with the reticle targeting and a button layout that matches how I normally setup my MMO keybindings. The streamlining of skill trees is great, each weapon seems distinct, a lot less repetition in the skills. The weapon specializations go a long way to make the weapons feel unique as well. I am currently playing around with elementalism and the heat mechanic adds so much to the strategy of individual fights. No more “build build build release” cycle ad naseum, I am always constantly balancing heat build up and energy use, actively trying to create situations for situational skills. Huge improvement to the combat and skill systems.

The dailies and having four (FOUR!) currencies are distinct low points. I have come to hate the daily system, on first blush it seems like you get credit for doing normal world stuff, but in reality you don’t complete them fast enough to get thru them in a night. So I either rush thru quests, resentful that I can’t take my time with them or put what I want to do on hold to go to Kingsmouth where the rewards beyond fast dailies are not great. I am hoping a lot of this pain goes away once I am thru the story content and I feel free to focus on the dailies exclusively.

Overall I am loving the re-launched game and am optimistic it will do well.

Still playing, just slowly working my way through. Finally to City of the Sun God or whatever the second zone is and already hit 50. Just slowly tinkering through the game and being frustrated by many of the same issues that have frustrated me since launch or since the last time I went through the zone.

At least levels make bypassing a lot of mobs a lot easier when it comes to cheesing missions.

I gave it a shot but I’m still pretty confused about what the point of SWL was and what it means for TSW. Not enough seems different to warrant a whole new game, and I actually find the combat to be even worse than it was before (but that could be because using pistols–my favorite weapons–feels sluggish now). Like everyone else, I enjoyed TSW for the “story and atmosphere”, but not enough to do the whole thing again under slightly different circumstances. Character creation also (somehow) seems worse, and I don’t appreciate having to choose a class.
Still, if this is the shot in the arm TSW needed and it’s what its player-base wanted, good on them. I already wasn’t playing it, so it could be that SWL wasn’t being aimed at me, which is fine.

Still playing, but slowing down a bit. Reached that point where you’re level capped, you’ve got capstones on your preferred weapons, and you’re mostly just finishing the story and working on the gear treadmill. The things I liked most about TSW are still there, the things I liked least (aside from AEGIS) are still there, and I’m starting to reach the been-there done-that stage. New story or GTFO, same as before the relaunch

I’m actually LOVING redoing the whole thing way more than I thought I would. SO much I am not remembering from doing this all 5 years ago. And I Templar story in Tokyo which I never did before — only Lumie =D

And I’m done. I will not go back for the steam re-re-launch. SWL failed to deliver and was a shell of its former self. I total loss. All they had to do was remove Aegis, make dungeons easier to story mode through, clean up the animations, and stream line crafting. Instead they stripped the game down to hardly nothing. Itemization, gone. Skill synergy, gone. Variety of character customization in skills and weapons, gone. And on top of that, the worst aspect of TSW (AEGIS) will still be in the game in some form. They effed this re-launch up on every level.

From what they’ve said in streams the only similarity between the AEGIS in TSW and the one coming when they add in Tokyo later in August is likely to be the name. There’s currently no need for a power level reset in SWL like there was in TSW.